Shylock's Daughter - Hardcover

Gr. 8-12. Anyone who has seen or read Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has wondered about the motives of the main characters. What are Lorenzo's true feelings about Jessica? Why does Shylock remain so insistent on his pound of flesh? Does it bother Jessica to leave her heritage behind? Pressler looks beyond Shakespeare's words and comes up with a revelatory story, one in which the players take the opportunity to display more of their strengths and expose more of their foibles. The book also sheds a bright light on the world in which these characters planned, loved, and dreamed. Late-sixteenth-century Venice was a place where Christians and Jews interacted under the most unevenhanded conditions; where life in the Jewish ghetto, while rigorously proscribed, offered familiarity and even a kind of safety; but where the burdens of being "other" could crush men's souls. Here, setting is context.

Still, for those not burdened by religion, Venice in the 1500s was a place of opulence and festivity. It is no surprise that 16-year-old Jessica, Shylock's headstrong daughter, is bewitched by the outside world. When a young Italian nobleman, Lorenzo, shows he has designs on her, Jessica is stunned, frightened, and delirious at the thought she may escape the rule-heavy sameness of her life. Yet there are other people to be considered: her nurse, Amalia, who has loved her since the death of her own mother; foster sister Dahliah, a squinty-eyed girl who is devoted to Jessica; and, of course, her miserly, maddening father, Shylock. Even so, when it comes to other people's feelings versus the freedom she might feel by marrying Lorenzo (which brings with it automatic baptism into the Christian faith), Jessica is determined to follow the path that she is sure will bring her happiness.

German novelist Pressler does some impressive things here. The multisided views of the characters she offers are not unexpected, but they are done extraordinarily well, perhaps because the author goes beyond personality and mixes in motive. By adding new characters, like Dahliah (who gets her own first-person chapters) and Amalia, Pressler expands what we think we know about those who inhabit The Merchant of Venice and gives us a glimpse into what Jews living during the Middle Ages must have thought and felt. No one here can be seen through a single lens. As loathsome as Shylock can be, here even more than in the play, readers will react to his cry that Jews are like everyone else: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Jessica will certainly resonate with young readers. She wants what she wants. Yet by the end of the book, she realizes full well what she has given up, even as she understands she must go forward with her life because there is no going back.

Throughout, Pressler's writing choices are strong, often unexpected, and her style is sharp and observant, yet iced with a cool pity for her characters. It is not often that a YA author can make adult characters as intrinsically interesting as young people, but here, too, Pressler succeeds, perhaps because everyone's hopes and fears are so tightly laced together.

As translator Brian Murdoch explains in his fascinating afterword, Pressler also successfully takes on the job of mirroring many Shakespearean conventions, such as dressing girls as boys and using the play-within-a-play technique, thus extending her own story but also furthering Shakespeare's original.

Although excellent as a read-alone, Shylock's Daughter will be an outstanding novel to teach, especially in conjunction with The Merchant of Venice. It is not only a complex examination of motives and actions; it is an unwavering look at history. Without ever saying the word, it shows how prejudice warps the spirit and shatters lives. Neither victim nor victimizer comes away unscathed. Ilene Cooper
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